DREW, Wayland

(1932-)

   Canadian teacher and writer who began publishing sf with The Wabeno Feast (1973), a complex tale about HOLOCAUST and its roots, in which three narrative strands all tangibly cohere-the 18th-century journal of an early entrepreneur who confronts the heart of darkness in the pale wabeno (an Indian shaman), the canoe trip of a Canadian couple through the wilderness upon which the earlier visitor has already stamped the seal of the civilized world, and a NEAR FUTURE flight into the same but now savaged wilderness on the part of escapees from a DISASTER directly tied to the spoliation of the planet. After Dragonslayer * (1981 US), a film tie, WD composed in The Erthring Cycle another post-holocaust narrative - The Memoirs of Alcheringia (1984 US), The Gaian Experiment (1985 US) and The Master of Norriya (1986 US) - which describes the founding of a secret underground society, the Yggdrasil Project, via which it is hoped to surmount inevitable planetary catastrophe. But, as the final volume moves to a quiet, sombre close, the reader will perhaps be reminded of the dying fall which concludes George R. STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949).

   JC

   Other works: * batteries not included * (1987 US), novelizing * BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED (1987); Willow * (1988 US), another film tie; Halfway Man * (1989).